June 22, 2022
Ghanbarian and Higgins awarded American Chemical Society funding
Submitted by Behzad Ghanbarian
Behzad Ghanbarian, assistant professor of geology, and Daniel Higgins, professor and head of the chemistry department, received $110,000 from the American Chemical Society-Petroleum Research Fund to investigate the molecular mechanism of mass transport in shales. Through this two-year project, two graduate students will work on mass transport phenomena providing them with multidisciplinary training and research experiences.
Unconventional reservoirs, including oil and gas shales, are one of the major contributors to energy supplies in the U.S. and are distributed around the world with an estimated endowment of several thousand trillion cubic feet. Full production of unconventional reservoirs is limited in part by the incomplete understanding of mass transport mechanisms in shales. Ghanbarian and Higgins investigate these transport phenomena using fluorescence-based optical single-molecule methods.